Tenon

Tenon designs flat-pack parts and lays them out on the board you are actually going to cut.

You do not draw anything. You pick a product — a box, a cabinet, a tray, a pegboard panel — and turn its parameters. Tenon generates the parts, cuts the joinery into them, and nests every part of every item onto your stock, redrawing as you type. When it looks right, you either export a CAM-ready bundle of SVGs or send the job straight to MapleCAM to cut.

What it is for

A flat-pack design is a set of parts that fit together with cut joinery — finger joints, half-laps, tabs into slots — so a sheet of plywood becomes a box without fasteners. Getting that right by hand is fiddly: the joints have to interlock, the slots have to allow for the cutter's kerf, and the parts have to fit the board you own. Tenon does that arithmetic.

It is deliberately narrow. It knows about parts, joints, and sheets; it does not generate toolpaths, drive machines, or write G-code. That is MapleCAM's job, and the two hand off to each other.

What a design contains

One design is a cut list:

• Shared stock — one board, one material, one cutter. Every item is cut from the same setup, so the stock lives once at the design level rather than being repeated per item.
• Line items — each a product, its own parameters, and a quantity.

Everything on the list nests together onto the shared board. Change the board thickness and every item's joinery follows, because thickness is what finger joints are cut from.

Where to start

• Installation — get it running.
• Your First Design — a box, start to cut file.
• The Cut List — how stock and items relate.

Tenon is in development. What is documented here is what works today; anything still landing says so on the page.